Unbelievable. And yet.
I think the amazing part of the story, really, is that I let my guard down yet again. I… maybe I've been a bit preoccupied by my new life with Meniere's disease. Maybe I've been a little bit dazed and not entirely on the job. Maybe the recurring need to lie down and focus on a fixed object is taking up too much space on my hard drive. Maybe Ben and I were just really tired, and really wanted to relax for a few minutes, and so sat on the terrace finishing up dinner while the kids went inside. Isaac went in to play a computer game and Elias followed. I guess I didn't really think of what he was up to. I just assumed he was doing whatever Isaac was doing, and in that state of tiredness I truly didn't care.
Until. "MMMMOOOOOOOMMMMM!" Isaac shrieked. "COME HERE!! It's an EMERGENCY!" Now, unfortunately, many of Isaac's "emergencies" are more like inconveniences with which he would like help. Like the computer stopped for a moment, or he wants me to google "spiderman online video games" and can't spell many of the words. But in this case he ran out and actually looked pretty upset. I dragged my carcass in to see what all the fuss was about– and out of the corner of my eye I noticed through the window that Elias seemed to be securing himself into the bathroom. With that in mind I was vaguely expecting a potty related scene of some kind. But no. What I found was honey. Lots of honey. All over the place on the wall to wall carpet that we all-too-recently paid $200 to have professionally cleaned…
And that's not all.
The context is that when Ben came home, I was lying on the couch dealing with a brief interlude of spinning and gently tipping from side to side. I had been fending off the kids for a half hour or so from a prone position. The house through and through looked like crime scene anyway, but the TV room was really the nadir. The futon cover was off and in a grungy heap. Toys everywhere. Popcorn spilled among the toys. Pillows higgledy-piggledy, you get the idea. And Ben, feeling stressed out from a hard day of work just couldn't take it another minute. And so, he cleaned it all up. He put the futon cover on. He picked up all the toys. He vacuumed up the popcorn and everything else. He went through the room like a white tornado and order supplanted chaos. Then, as a final gesture of "humans do indeed live here" he ripped open the paper and unfurled the lovely Greek throw rug that had been dumped upon with honey in the last episode (checking my records, June 5), and had been taken by the cleaners, and returned spanking new. He spread it on the floor, and tah-dah! A lovely, habitable room!!
A scant thirty minutes later, Elias used a new trick. He stood a stool upon an overturned laundry basket, and thus gained a few more inches of height, and thus was able to get his little hands on a fairly new, full bottle of honey!! Not one to let opportunity slip away, he seized the moment. Isaac was sitting right there, but absorbed in his activities and didn't notice until it was too late.
When I came in and, I suppose, screamed, "OH MY GOD!" or words to that effect, Ben came running in and, had it been a cartoon his head would have shot up into the air and exploded like a firework. He confronted the hiding culprit and scolded him severely. Elias came running to me for succor, and I fairly sternly put him in a time out. Together we cleaned the mess up fairly well, with Ben fuming all the while. Justified, lord knows. Elias sat patiently and obviously chastened in his chair for a long, long time. We decided that his normal two-minute time out would be best replaced with a time-out for the duration of the cleaning process.
And now, exhausted by the proceedings, he's fallen fast asleep.
I had been locking the honey up with the medications, but clearly I forgot to do so this morning. I must have left it just in a normal cupboard, or god help me, right on the counter. The new policy: we just can't OWN HONEY. Period!